SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 14–1373
_________________
UTAH, PETITIONER
v. EDWARDJOSEPH
STRIEFF, JR.
on writ of certiorari to the supreme court of
utah
[June 20, 2016]
Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Ginsburg
joins as to Parts I, II, and III, dissenting.
The Court today holds that the discovery of a
warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police
officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be
soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the
police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and
check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing
nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you
forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will
admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you
after arresting you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment
should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent.
I
Minutes after Edward Strieff walked out of a
South Salt Lake City home, an officer stopped him, questioned him,
and took his identification to run it through a police database.
The officer did not suspect that Strieff had done anything wrong.
Strieff just happened to be the first person to leave a house that
the officer thought might contain “drug activity.” App. 16–19.
As the State of Utah concedes, this stop was
illegal. App. 24. The Fourth Amendment protects people from
“unreasonable searches and seizures.” An officer breaches that
protection when he detains a pedestrian to check his license
without any evidence that the person is engaged in a crime.
Delaware v.
Prouse, 440 U. S. 648, 663 (1979) ;
Terry v.
Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, 21 (1968) . The
officer deepens the breach when he prolongs the detention just to
fish further for evidence of wrongdoing.
Rodriguez v.
United States, 575 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2015) (slip op.,
at 6–7). In his search for lawbreaking, the officer in this case
himself broke the law.
The officer learned that Strieff had a “small
traffic warrant.” App. 19. Pursuant to that warrant, he arrested
Strieff and, conducting a search incident to the arrest, discovered
methamphetamine in Strieff’s pockets.
Utah charged Strieff with illegal drug
possession. Before trial, Strieff argued that admitting the drugs
into evidence would condone the officer’s misbehavior. The
methamphetamine, he reasoned, was the product of the officer’s
illegal stop. Admitting it would tell officers that unlawfully
discovering even a “small traffic warrant” would give them license
to search for evidence of unrelated offenses. The Utah Supreme
Court unanimously agreed with Strieff. A majority of this Court now
reverses.
II
It is tempting in a case like this, where
illegal conduct by an officer uncovers illegal conduct by a
civilian, to forgive the officer. After all, his instincts,
although unconstitutional, were correct. But a basic principle lies
at the heart of the Fourth Amendment: Two wrongs don’t make a
right. See
Weeks v.
United States, 232 U. S.
383, 392 (1914) . When “lawless police conduct” uncovers evidence
of lawless civilian conduct, this Court has long required later
criminal trials to exclude the illegally obtained evidence.
Terry, 392 U. S., at 12;
Mapp v.
Ohio,
367 U. S. 643, 655 (1961) . For example, if an officer breaks
into a home and finds a forged check lying around, that check may
not be used to prosecute the homeowner for bank fraud. We would
describe the check as “ ‘fruit of the poisonous tree.’ ”
Wong Sun v.
United States, 371 U. S. 471, 488
(1963) . Fruit that must be cast aside includes not only evidence
directly found by an illegal search but also evidence “come at by
exploitation of that illegality.”
Ibid.
This “exclusionary rule” removes an incentive
for officers to search us without proper justification.
Terry, 392 U. S.
, at 12
. It also keeps
courts from being “made party to lawless invasions of the
constitutional rights of citizens by permitting unhindered
governmental use of the fruits of such invasions.”
Id., at
13. When courts admit only lawfully obtained evidence, they
encourage “those who formulate law enforcement polices, and the
officers who implement them, to incorporate Fourth Amendment ideals
into their value system.”
Stone v.
Powell, 428
U. S. 465, 492 (1976) . But when courts admit illegally
obtained evidence as well, they reward “manifest neglect if not an
open defiance of the prohibitions of the Constitution.”
Weeks, 232 U. S., at 394.
Applying the exclusionary rule, the Utah Supreme
Court correctly decided that Strieff’s drugs must be excluded
because the officer exploited his illegal stop to discover them.
The officer found the drugs only after learning of Strieff’s
traffic violation; and he learned of Strieff’s traffic violation
only because he unlawfully stopped Strieff to check his driver’s
license.
The court also correctly rejected the State’s
argument that the officer’s discovery of a traffic warrant
unspoiled the poisonous fruit. The State analogizes finding the
warrant to one of our earlier decisions,
Wong Sun v.
United States. There, an officer illegally arrested a person
who, days later, voluntarily returned to the station to confess to
committing a crime. 371 U. S., at 491. Even though the person
would not have confessed “but for the illegal actions of the
police,”
id., at 488, we noted that the police did not
exploit their illegal arrest to obtain the confession,
id.,
at 491
. Because the confession was obtained by “means
sufficiently distinguishable” from the constitutional violation, we
held that it could be admitted into evidence.
Id., at 488,
491
. The State contends that the search incident to the
warrant-arrest here is similarly distinguishable from the illegal
stop.
But
Wong Sun explains why Strieff’s drugs
must be excluded. We reasoned that a Fourth Amendment violation may
not color every investigation that follows but it certainly stains
the actions of officers who exploit the infraction. We
distinguished evidence obtained by innocuous means from evidence
obtained by exploiting misconduct after considering a variety of
factors: whether a long time passed, whether there were
“intervening circumstances,” and whether the purpose or flagrancy
of the misconduct was “calculated” to procure the evidence.
Brown v.
Illinois, 422 U. S. 590 –604
(1975).
These factors confirm that the officer in this
case discovered Strieff’s drugs by exploiting his own illegal
conduct. The officer did not ask Strieff to volunteer his name only
to find out, days later, that Strieff had a warrant against him.
The officer illegally stopped Strieff and immediately ran a warrant
check. The officer’s discovery of a warrant was not some
intervening surprise that he could not have anticipated. Utah lists
over 180,000 misdemeanor warrants in its database, and at the time
of the arrest, Salt Lake County had a “backlog of outstanding
warrants” so large that it faced the “potential for civil
liability.” See Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics,Survey of State Criminal History Information Systems,
2014 (2015) (Systems Survey) (Table 5a), online at
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bjs/grants/249799.pdf (all Internet
materials as last visited June 16, 2016); Inst. for Law and Policy
Planning, Salt Lake County Crim-inal Justice System Assessment 6.7
(2004), online at
http://www. slco.org / cjac / resources / SaltLakeCJSAfinal.pdf.
The officer’s violation was also calculated to procure evidence.
His sole reason for stopping Strieff, he acknowledged, was
investigative—he wanted to discover whether drug activity was going
on in the house Strieff had just exited. App. 17.
The warrant check, in other words, was not an
“intervening circumstance” separating the stop from the search for
drugs. It was part and parcel of the officer’s illegal “expedition
for evidence in the hope that something might turn up.”
Brown, 422 U. S., at 605. Under our precedents, because
the officer found Strieff’s drugs by exploiting his own
constitutional violation, the drugs should be excluded.
III
A
The Court sees things differently. To the
Court, the fact that a warrant gives an officer cause to arrest a
person severs the connection between illegal policing and the
resulting discovery of evidence.
Ante, at 7. This is a
remarkable proposition: The mere existence of a warrant not only
gives an officer legal cause to arrest and search a person, it also
forgives an officer who, with no knowledge of the warrant at all,
unlawfully stops that person on a whim or hunch.
To explain its reasoning, the Court relies on
Segura v.
United States, 468 U. S. 796 (1984) .
There, federal agents applied for a warrant to search an apartment
but illegally entered the apartment to secure it before the judge
issued the warrant.
Id., at 800–801. After receiving the
warrant, the agents then searched the apartment for drugs.
Id., at 801. The question before us was what to do with the
evidence the agents then discovered. We declined to suppress it
because “[t]he illegal entry into petitioners’ apartment did not
contribute in any way to discovery of the evidence seized under the
warrant.”
Id., at 815.
According to the majority,
Segura
involves facts “similar” to this case and “suggest[s]” that a valid
warrant will clean up whatever illegal conduct uncovered it.
Ante, at 6–7. It is difficult to understand this
interpretation. In
Segura, the agents’ illegal conduct in
entering the apartment had nothing to do with their procurement of
a search warrant. Here, the officer’s illegal conduct in stopping
Strieff was essential to his discovery of an arrest warrant.
Segura would be similar only if the agents used information
they illegally obtained from the apartment to procure a search
warrant or discover an arrest warrant. Precisely because that was
not the case, the Court admitted the untainted evidence. 468
U. S., at 814.
The majority likewise misses the point when it
calls the warrant check here a “ ‘negligibly burdensome
precautio[n]’ ” taken for the officer’s “safety.”
Ante,
at 8 (quoting
Rodriguez, 575 U. S., at ___ (slip op.,
at 7)). Remember, the officer stopped Strieff without suspecting
him of committing any crime. By his own account, the officer did
not fear Strieff. Moreover, the safety rationale we discussed in
Rodriguez, an opinion about highway patrols, is
conspicuously absent here. A warrant check on a highway “ensur[es]
that vehicles on the road are operated safely and responsibly.”
Id., at ___ (slip op., at 6). We allow such checks during
legal traffic stops because the legitimacy of a person’s driver’s
license has a “close connection to roadway safety.”
Id., at
___ (slip op., at 7). A warrant check of a pedestrian on a
sidewalk, “by contrast, is a measure aimed at ‘detect[ing] evidence
of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.’ ”
Ibid. (quoting
Indianapolis v.
Edmond, 531 U. S. 32 –41
(2000)). Surely we would not allow officers to warrant-check random
joggers, dog walkers, and lemonade vendors just to ensure they pose
no threat to anyone else.
The majority also posits that the officer could
not have exploited his illegal conduct because he did not violate
the Fourth Amendment on purpose. Rather, he made “good-faith
mistakes.”
Ante, at 8. Never mind that the officer’s sole
purpose was to fish for evidence. The majority casts his
unconstitutional actions as “negligent” and therefore incapable of
being deterred by the exclusionary rule.
Ibid.
But the Fourth Amendment does not tolerate an
officer’s unreasonable searches and seizures just because he did
not know any better. Even officers prone to negligence can learn
from courts that exclude illegally obtained evidence.
Stone,
428 U. S., at 492. Indeed, they are perhaps the most in need
of the education, whether by the judge’s opinion, the prosecutor’s
future guidance, or an updated manual on criminal procedure. If the
officers are in doubt about what the law requires, exclusion gives
them an “incentive to err on the side of constitutional behavior.”
United States v.
Johnson, 457 U. S. 537, 561
(1982) .
B
Most striking about the Court’s opinion is its
insistence that the event here was “isolated,” with “no indication
that this unlawful stop was part of any systemic or recurrent
police misconduct.”
Ante, at 8–9. Respectfully, nothing
about this case is isolated.
Outstanding warrants are surprisingly common.
When a person with a traffic ticket misses a fine payment or court
appearance, a court will issue a warrant. See,
e.g., Brennan
Center for Justice, Criminal Justice Debt 23 (2010), online at
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/Fees%20and%20Fines%20FINAL.pdf.
When a person on probation drinks alcohol or breaks curfew, a court
will issue a warrant. See,
e.g., Human Rights Watch,
Profiting from Probation 1, 51 (2014), online at
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/05/profiting-probation/ americas - offender - funded - probation-industry.
The States and Federal Government maintain databases with over 7.8
million outstanding warrants, the vast majority of which appear to
be for minor offenses. See Systems Survey (Table 5a). Even these
sources may not track the “staggering” numbers of warrants,
“ ‘drawers and drawers’ ” full, that many cities issue
for traffic violations and ordinance infractions. Dept. of Justice,
Civil Rights Div., Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department
47, 55 (2015) (Ferguson Report), online at https://www.justice.gov/
sites / default / files / opa / press - releases / attachments / 2015 / 03 /
04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf. The county in this case
has had a “backlog” of such warrants. See
supra, at 4. The
Department of Justice recently reported that in the town of
Ferguson, Missouri, with a population of 21,000, 16,000 people had
outstanding warrants against them. Ferguson Report, at 6, 55.
Justice Department investigations across the
country have illustrated how these astounding numbers of warrants
can be used by police to stop people without cause. In a single
year in New Orleans, officers “made nearly 60,000 arrests, of which
about 20,000 were of people with outstanding traffic or misdemeanor
warrants from neighboring parishes for such infractions as unpaid
tickets.” Dept. of Justice, Civil Rights Div., Investigation of the
New Orleans Police Department 29 (2011), online at
https://www.justice.gov / sites / default / files / crt / legacy/2011/03/17/nopd_report.pdf.
In the St. Louis metropolitan area, officers “routinely” stop
people—on the street, at bus stops, or even in court—for no reason
other than “an officer’s desire to check whether the subject had a
municipal arrest warrant pending.” Ferguson Report, at 49,
57
. In Newark, New Jersey, officers stopped 52,235
pedestrians within a 4-year period and ran warrant checks on 39,308
of them. Dept. of Justice, Civil Rights Div., Investigation of the
Newark Police Department 8, 19, n. 15 (2014), online at
https://www.justice.gov/sites /default / files / crt /legacy / 2014 / 07 / 22 / newark _ findings _7-22-14.pdf.
The Justice Department analyzed these warrant-checked stops and
reported that “approximately 93% of the stops would have been
considered unsupported by articulated reason-able suspicion.”
Id., at 9, n. 7.
I do not doubt that most officers act in “good
faith” and do not set out to break the law. That does not mean
these stops are “isolated instance[s] of negligence,” however.
Ante, at 8. Many are the product of institutionalized
training procedures. The New York City Police Department long
trained officers to, in the words of a District Judge, “stop and
question first, develop reasonable suspicion later.”
Ligon
v.
New York, 925 F. Supp. 2d 478, 537–538 (SDNY), stay
granted on other grounds, 736 F. 3d 118 (CA2 2013). The Utah
Supreme Court described as “ ‘routine procedure’ or ‘common
practice’ ” the decision of Salt Lake City police officers to
run warrant checks on pedestrians they detained without reasonable
suspicion.
State v.
Topanotes, 2003 UT 30, ¶2, 76
P. 3d 1159, 1160. In the related context of traffic stops, one
widely followed police manual instructs officers looking for drugs
to “run at least a warrants check on all drivers you stop.
Statistically, narcotics offenders are . . . more likely
to fail to appear on simple citations, such as traffic or trespass
violations, leading to the issuance of bench warrants. Discovery of
an outstanding warrant gives you cause for an immediate custodial
arrest and search of the suspect.” C. Remsberg, Tactics for
Criminal Patrol 205–206 (1995); C. Epp et al., Pulled Over 23,
33–36 (2014).
The majority does not suggest what makes this
case “isolated” from these and countless other examples. Nor does
it offer guidance for how a defendant can prove that his arrest was
the result of “widespread” misconduct. Surely it should not take a
federal investigation of Salt Lake County before the Court would
protect someone in Strieff’s position.
IV
Writing only for myself, and drawing on my
professional experiences, I would add that unlawful “stops” have
severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested
by the name. This Court has given officers an array of instruments
to probe and examine you. When we condone officers’ use of these
devices without adequate cause, we give them reason to target
pedestrians in an arbitrary manner. We also risk treating members
of our communities as second-class citizens.
Although many Americans have been stopped for
speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be
when the officer is looking for more. This Court has allowed an
officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can
point to a pretextual justification after the fact.
Whren v.
United States, 517 U. S. 806, 813 (1996) . That
justification must provide specific reasons why the officer
suspected you were breaking the law,
Terry, 392 U. S.,
at 21, but it may factor in your ethnicity,
United States v.
Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S. 873 –887 (1975), where you
live,
Adams v.
Williams, 407 U. S. 143, 147
(1972) , what you were wearing,
United States v.
Sokolow, 490 U. S. 1 –5 (1989), and how you behaved,
Illinois v.
Wardlow, 528 U. S. 119 –125 (2000).
The officer does not even need to know which law you might have
broken so long as he can later point to any possible
infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.
Devenpeck v.
Alford, 543 U. S. 146 –155 (2004);
Heien v.
North Carolina, 574 U. S. ___
(2014).
The indignity of the stop is not limited to an
officer telling you that you look like a criminal. See Epp, Pulled
Over, at 5. The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect
your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. See
Florida v.
Bostick, 501 U. S. 429, 438 (1991) .
Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless,
perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.”
Terry, 392
U. S., at 17. If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he
may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a
pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “ ‘feel with
sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search
[may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the
groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs
down to the feet.’ ”
Id., at 17, n. 13.
The officer’s control over you does not end with
the stop. If the officer chooses, he may handcuff you and take you
to jail for doing nothing more than speeding, jaywalking, or
“driving [your] pickup truck . . . with [your] 3-year-old
son and 5-year-old daughter . . . without [your] seatbelt
fastened.”
Atwater v.
Lago Vista, 532 U. S. 318
–324 (2001). At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the
inside of your mouth, and force you to “shower with a delousing
agent” while you “lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn
around, and lift [your] genitals.”
Florence v.
Board of
Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington, 566 U. S. ___,
___–___ (2012) (slip op., at 2–3);
Maryland v.
King,
569 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (slip op., at 28). Even if you are
innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest
record and experience the “civil death” of discrimination by
employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check.
Chin, The New Civil Death, 160 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1789, 1805
(2012); see J. Jacobs, The Eternal Criminal Record 33–51 (2015);
Young & Petersilia, Keeping Track, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1318,
1341–1357 (2016). And, of course, if you fail to pay bail or appear
for court, a judge will issue a warrant to render you “arrestable
on sight” in the future. A. Goffman, On the Run 196 (2014).
This case involves a
suspicionless stop,
one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without
justification. As the Justice Department notes,
supra, at 8,
many innocent people are subjected to the humiliations of these
unconstitutional searches. The white defendant in this case shows
that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner. See M.
Gottschalk, Caught 119–138 (2015). But it is no secret that people
of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. See
M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow 95–136 (2010). For generations,
black and brown parents have given their children “the
talk”—instructing them never to run down the street; always keep
your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking
back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun
will react to them. See,
e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls
of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T.
Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).
By legitimizing the conduct that produces this
double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black,
guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status
at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while
courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are
not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state,
just waiting to be cataloged.
We must not pretend that the countless people
who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the
canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us
that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. See L. Guinier & G.
Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274–283 (2002). They are the ones who
recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil
liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter
too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
* * *
I dissent.